


Phoenix

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (sort of), Episode Tag, Fix-It, Gen, Immortal!Lovelace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8866834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: Lovelace doesn’t remember dying.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for canon-typical discussion of violence / character death / etc. 
> 
> :/

Lovelace looks Warren Kepler in the face as best she can and says, “ _Fuck you._ ” 

At some point, Eiffel tells her to stop. Begs, practically. He doesn’t seem to get that there’s nowhere they can go from here. If she’s going to die, she’s going to die words aflame, she’s going to die sticking it to the man, she’s going to die as herself, because after all of this there’s no point if she can’t at least do _that_.

She hears the bullet more than feels it.

***

Hilbert was so convinced she’d been swallowed up by the star. At the time, she was mostly just delighted to see him so goddamn terrified, but recently she kept wondering wondering if there was more to it that. Whether or not Hilbert had seen her die himself, someone had thought she was dead. If not—what was the point? What could possible have been the _point_ of taking three years of her life only to send her back here?

Maybe doing something so pointless is just the kind of thing Goddard would pull. It’s hard to tell with them. But was never really a satisfying explanation.

***

Lovelace gasps. The air pulls sharply through her disused lungs, and for a moment she just lies there, floating. She doesn’t remember dying. She should, shouldn’t she? Kepler was going to kill her, going to put a bullet through her head and end this hell once and for all. She heard the gun fire. 

Maybe he missed? It doesn’t seem likely.

Her vision slides into focus, and the room takes shape around her. Empty, apart from her, and the chairs, and the rope still lashing her too-cold body to its surface. She tugs at it, and the frayed ends pull apart.

Lovelace laughs aloud. The sound is something real, something she can hold onto to know that she exists and is alive. “Where in the world did everyone go?” she asks the empty room.

“What was that?”

Lovelace looks towards the direction of the voice before she processes who it was who spoke. “Hera.”

“What—I…” There’s an abrupt change in tone as Hera says, “Oh my god, wait, Captain! How—how are you…”

“Alive?” Lovelace says. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Which is maybe not quite true, but it’s true enough for the moment.

“As to your original question,” Hera says, “Minkowski and Eiffel are… somewhere on the Hephaestus, trying to figure this out. Jacobi and Kepler are temporarily stationed in the observation deck.”

There’s a note of smug pride in Hera’s voice on this last, and Lovelace says, “You guys did it?” Hera hasn’t had the time to respond before the other question occurs to her. “Maxwell and Hilbert…?”

“Both dead.”

How to respond to that?

“At least, last I checked,” Hera says.

Right. That whole thing. The part where the last time Lovelace was awake, she was looking down the barrel of a gun.

Lovelace heads towards the door. “I should talk to the others.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Hera says. “You were just shot. You should—you should rest. I can get one of the others to come over—“

“I’m fine, Hera,” Lovelace says, catching the door frame in her hand. “Take me to Minkowski.”

***

The expression on Eiffel’s face—wide-eyed, mouth open—would be hilarious if it wasn’t so well-earned. There are things you can be irrationally shocked over, but this isn’t one of them.

“So,” she says. “Not dead.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Hera,” Minkowski says, very quietly. Everything is quiet, just now, or maybe it only seems that way. The station is down two crew members, after all.

“No way,” Eiffel says. Minkowski turns to look at him, dragging her gaze from where it had been fixed on Lovelace. “I saw you die.”

“Heard that one before,” Lovelace says with a grin. It’s forced, but she’ll take any chance she can get at humor just now. 

She realizes she’s still standing in the entryway, far across from them, and closes the distance. The movement seems to chip away at some of the remaining quiet.

“That doesn’t explain how—“

“Why don’t we all just agree not to look a gift horse in the mouth and move on with our lives?” Lovelace says.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Minkowski says, addressing her for the first time. “Just because you’re not dead, to have survived that shot… We should get you to medical, Hilbert can—“ She breaks off. “We should look at your wound.”

“What are you going to do about it? Stare it into healing?”

Minkowski bites her lip doesn’t meet her gaze.

There’s still blood caught in Lovelace’s hair where the bullet hit, and it only now occurs to her that she must look as bad as she feels. Probably worse: Eiffel and Minkowski were expecting to see a ghost, and here she is still wearing her death wounds like it’s nothing. She reaches a hand up to feel it sticking to the side of her head.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll go… wash it off, see what I can do. Is that good enough?”

Minkowski nods.

***

Lovelace doesn’t remember dying. At least, not most days. Her life before seems distant, another world unto itself, and that feeling—that’s worse than anything else. How does she know it was even real, when all she has are these memories she can’t even rely on?

There are days when she believes herself, about not knowing what happened that landed her back here. It was true that first day, that first time she said it. But sometimes she _can_ remember, in faint hazes and wisps of images that hit her like an asteroid slamming into the Earth. The ship falling apart around her, and then _she_ fell apart, too, consumed in that fiery blaze of red starlight, and then…

And then she didn’t. Then she made it back. Despite all apparent evidence to the contrary.

***

Lovelace dabs the blood off of with a wet sponge. A few of the reddened water droplets spill of into the air and hang there, floating. She’s sure this particular task would be easier with someone else helping, but hell if she’s going to let that happen.

Lovelace turns towards the mirror to see better what she’s doing, and then shakes her head at the absurdity of it. Why should she care about how it _looks_ at a time look this?

“Captain?” Hera’s voice makes Lovelace flinch in surprise. Even after so long, she still falls too easily for the illusion that she’s alone.

“Jesus, Hera, what is it?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just… I couldn’t help but notice that, uh, well. There isn’t any bullet wound.”

“What?” She looks back at the mirror. Hera’s right. It’s hard to tell, under her hair, but with the blood washed off… there’s nothing else there. “Huh.” It makes all too much sense, just now. There wouldn’t be much point in this weird-ass space magic reviving her if she’d just die from a bullet lodged in her skull anyways. Her breath catches at that thought. It’s the first time she’s really acknowledged the reality of what could have— _should_ have—happened to her.

“Maybe it only grazed you?” Hera suggests. “Maybe that’s how you managed to survive.”

“Yeah,” Lovelace says, running a finger over the spot where she’d been shot an hour earlier. “Right.”

***

It takes a while longer of the four of them beating around the subject for someone to say it out loud: “What do we do now?” 

It’s Minkowski, and she sounds about as lost as Eiffel still looks. Lovelace can’t blame her, of course. They’d filled her in on what had happened while she was… out, and she isn’t sure whether she’s impressed or just sorry, because the Minkowski she met all those months ago would never have made that call. But then, neither would the Lovelace who walked into that Goddard recruitment office three years ago, either.

“We do what we always said we’d do,” Lovelace says. “We take what’s left of our people and we leave.” This is met only by silence.

For a moment, at least. “I hate to say it,” Eiffel says, “but what about the contact event?”

“To hell with the contact event!” Lovelace says. “Don’t you get it? That isn’t our problem anymore.”

“No, I mean…” Eiffel sighs. “If we leave now, couldn’t that, like, interfere with the ship’s systems? Like literally _every time before_?”

“All the more reason to get out of here as soon as humanly possible.”

“I agree,” Minkowski cuts in. “Eiffel… Aren’t you ready to go home?” 

After a heartbeat’s hesitation, Eiffel nods.

***

Lovelace watches the shimmering blue star out the window as she floats, adrift, in some back room of the Urania. Minkowski insisted that she “rest” while they finish finalizing the ship’s navigational path. She couldn’t bring herself to argue, despite the fact that there was no way she needed it any more than Minkowski or Eiffel did. 

Now she’s left with all this dead time to fill. It isn’t as if she’s going to be able to sleep, even this exhausted. She’s had more than her fill of not being awake for today. Maybe she should go insist they let her help, after all. They’re so close to making it out, every second Lovelace spends not actively working on travel prep feels like a second wasted.

“The bullet didn’t graze you,” Hera says.

“Are you going to keep doing this?” Lovelace asks. “Jumping in uninvited?”

“I’m exercising some newfound freedom, yes,” Hera says, a smile in her voice. “But you’re avoiding the question.”

“You didn’t _ask_ a question.” It’s a petty thing to nitpick, but she doesn’t care.

“The bullet didn’t graze you,” Hera says again. “I’ve been reviewing that footage. Kepler shot you. Point blank.”

Lovelace straightens herself. “You haven’t… mentioned this to the others, have you?”

Hera scoffs, the speakers turning the sound faint and grainy. “No,” she says. “I haven’t. But if you don’t explain exactly what is going on here—“

“Can’t you check the footage?” Since that’s apparently such a useful analytical tool.

“He shoots you,” Hera says. “Just under an hour later, you stand up, and have a conversation with me. _How_.”

“Hey, your guess is a good as mine.” Lovelace pushes off and catches a handhold on the ceiling/wall. She’s not going to just sit there while Hera makes whatever wild accusation is about to come.

“Really?”

Lovelace sighs, the defensive tension fading. “Yeah.”

“Huh.”

Hera goes quiet. The silence drags on a moment, and Lovelace realizes she must have assumed this was the end to the conversation.

What must this be like, for Hera? Even having known A.I.s for so long, it’s still hard sometimes to really grasp. How it must be, to be watching all of this yet forced to the sidelines, constantly? To be able to have your free will overwritten at the stroke of a button?

“Hera,” Lovelace says, a realization grabbing her. “Are you going to be able to come back to Earth with us?”

“What? Oh. Yeah. I talked it through with… with _Commander_ Minkowski earlier. We’re pretty sure we were able to import my entire personality software into the Urania’s mainframe.”

Lovelace nods. “That’s good, I guess.”

“Not going to blow me up this time?”

Lovelace laughs. It’s strange, after the day they’ve had. “No.”

Silence, again. The faint hum of the Urania’s engines in the background, a subtly different sound from the Hephaestus’. The first time Lovelace came aboard it bothered her for hours. 

What will Earth be like, without any engine at all? 

Can she ever really return to a real, normal life after all of this?

“It’s happened before,” Lovelace says.

“What did?”

“My… returning from the dead,” Lovelace says. And then she begins to try the best she can to explain.

***

She doesn’t remember dying.

Isabel Lovelace died years ago. She heard the ship breaking down more than felt it. And when she woke up, however much time later, she thought she must have imagined it in the first place. She knows now that isn’t true, and there was some part of her who knew that, then, too. 

She couldn’t be sure it was even Isabel Lovelace it was who woke up in that pod. Couldn’t be sure of much of anything. But here’s what she did know, what part of her had known since those first few breaths of flame as the escape ship rebuilt around her: 

1\. There probably wasn’t any way to know what happened to her.

2\. She would get home no matter what the hell it took.

3\. She would get this crew home with her.


End file.
